In addition to the foundation’s 20th anniversary, this year marks another milestone I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the 25th anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women. (If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you may know it as the event where Hillary Clinton famously declared that “Human rights are women's rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”)
I remember reading about the conference and feeling that the world had planted an important stake in the ground for women. But it took years before I recognized how gender equality would fit into my own work.
After Bill and I started the foundation, I began spending time with women in the world’s poorest places. I wrote a lot about those trips in my book, The Moment of Lift, because they changed everything for me.
I met a woman who asked me to take her newborn home with me because she couldn’t imagine how she could afford to take care of him. I met sex workers in Thailand who helped me understand that if I had been born in their place, I, too, would do whatever it took to feed my family. I met a community health volunteer in Ethiopia who told me she once spent the night in a hole in the ground rather than returning to her abusive husband—when she was ten years old.
Each one of these women represents millions more. And what makes their stories even harder to bear is the knowledge that, unless we take action, they are stories that are destined to repeat themselves. Because if there’s one thing the world has learned over these last 25 years, it’s that these problems are not going away on their own.
The data is unequivocal: No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl.
There was another good read about strategies to meet the Sustainable Development Goals for women's representation set in Beijing on IPP Media...but I can't copy any text so you will have to click on the link if you are interested!
About 50 years ago, dozens of female researchers at Newsweek sued their employer for not letting them write for the magazine, keeping them behind the scenes while their male colleagues got the bylines. I’m reminded of this milestone in women’s struggle for equality when Esti Shushan – a cofounder of Nivcharot, a movement that promotes the representation of ultra-Orthodox women in state institutions – recalls her time as a journalist.
“I was writing for Haredi journals at the time,” Shushan says. “Like other Haredi women, I used a pseudonym, E. Shushan. Your editor tells you, ‘If you want to write for the serious sections in the newspaper and for male readers to take you seriously, it’s better if they don’t know that you’re a woman.’ Later, I found out that many of the male names alongside mine in the op-ed section, Menachem or Yossi, actually belonged to women. No one even imagined they were actually women. It got me into thinking about gender, about my role as a woman, and eventually to the understanding that my situation is problematic.”
If you close your eyes and only listen to Shushan and her fellow leaders of Nivcharot – Ester Twersky, Efrat Chocron, Hila Hassan Lefkowitz, Tirtza Bloch and Yael Elimelech – it’s easy to forget that they’re ultra-Orthodox. All of them are mothers in their thirties and forties, and they say they have nothing left to lose. “I’ve been through terrible things,” Shushan says. “My mental health was questioned, my relationships with my husband and my children, too. Nothing is out of bounds for them.”
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Women representing diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, professions, ethnicities, ages, geographical regions, and levels of experience are encouraged to apply (including those who have previously applied).
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Watch the PWV video showcasing many of the leaders who are graduates of our Progressive Women's Voices Training.
Please direct any questions to Kate McCarthy at [email protected]
